3/17/2016 Biggest Regret About Emailby Harry Forsdick, BBN Colleague
Ten years ago, I asked Ray if there was anything he wished he had done with the original email protocols. He thought for a short while and said that his biggest regret is that he didn't put some method to securely authenticate the identity of the sender in the protocols, which in turn lead to us all being deluged with spam. Of course once the evolving email protocols started to be used widely, it was too late to change them. Ray was really upset that this invention that he was associated with had devolved so much that a large percentage of the email traffic was now spam. Of course, in the intervening years, email filters have improved dramatically so that we don't see as much spam. But, it is still there, lurking beneath the surface, using up network bandwidth. But probably nowhere near the waste of bandwidth as all of the cat videos being streamed over the Internet these days. In 2002 there was almost an agreement (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3207.txt) reached by the major purveyors of email systems to introduce this kind feature into the protocols, but one of the software companies pulled out of the agreement at the last minute. With that failure to agree, the chances of this ever being fixed is miniscule. Comments are closed.
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